My Two Loves

My very first love has grey eyes. She loves sports and all things fitness, is kind and compassionate, utterly ambitious and is god’s gift to women in bed. My second love has deep brown eyes surrounded by a flutter of long eyelashes. She thinks her eyes are her best feature but I think her bum wins that argument hands down.

Unlike my first love who was the alarm-clock monitor for the mornings, I am that for second love. Second love used to unlock the office doors in the mornings but she can’t get out bed on days when I’m there. I get to wrap myself around her so tightly and plant lots of kisses on her. She can only come lose when I allow it. First love was open to many things. New foods, new places, and unconventional relationship practices. I mentioned a threesome and anal play to second love and she froze in the, ‘Am I not enough for you’ glare.

First love gave me lots of headaches and heartache but she also grew the romantic in me and taught me patience. I learned to operate under uncertainty and about living for the now. I saw drive and determination. I also saw fear, desperation, callousness, selfishness and insensitivity.

There was some power struggle and ego brandishing- who could live without who? Who would be the first to show that they needed the other person? Who would allow themselves to feel these things? Who could really be brave enough to be vulnerable? I failed at allowing myself to be who I really want to be. I was never brave enough to say, “I love you”.

Every day I spend with second love I learn more about selflessness. I learn what it means to live modestly and I see how naivety can be both beautiful and ugly. I think that my favourite thing about second love is that we can play with each other. We pull pranks on each other like when I pour water down her backside and she retaliates by pouring ice-cold cider all over me or sticking her tongue in my ear when I think she’s about to whisper something sweet. I like that she’s not afraid to show the extent of what she would do for me and she is also happy to accept the little I can offer. I like to charm her electronically by sending emails containing playlists for the day or cool images that I know will make her smile.

On some mornings, second love complains that she has back pain. I like to think it’s caused by all my moves so I advise yoga because I want my loves to be “natural”, “universal”, “cosmically conscious”, and “open”.

After I left first love, I compared every single person I got into bed with to her. I saw her eyes, tried to run my hands through her hair, licked her neck the way I knew she liked, and looked for the way her lips curled in a smile of post-sex satisfaction. I would always grab women’s behinds and pull them close to me in search of that spark.

I may be psychotic but I think I see similarities in second love. The near same gaze, the near same smile, a dissimilar reaction to the neck licking, and lots of intensity but three out of four is enough for me.

But there’s more. I like the way second love holds me like a bond that no chainsaw can break. I like how she touches me deliberately, asking me at several points if its OK for her to touch this or that. I like that she says she wants to make love to me rather than ‘fuck’. I like that we may not have done the craziest things in bed yet or fucked for hours on end but I would still feel utterly satisfied. Waking up next to her makes me feel complete. And I get the biggest smile when we discover that we were both in each others’ dreams. I feel like she’s a new best-friend who I need to catch up on every thing that happened before we met. I know that I don’t want to stop knowing her.

Ideally, we shouldn’t quantify love but in reality we can, and do. There’s a theory that no human is altruistic. That when we say we love, we are saying it because it is convenient. Because it makes us feel good, because we are getting something in return or have some assurances for the future. Many thanks to whoever coined monogamy, as a way to simplify things but reality is different. I wouldn’t answer if I had to choose. At the end of the day everybody is somebody’s everything. It just may not pan out the way you want.

Endnote: This piece was inspired by Oscar Wilde. “Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproducer that experience as often as possible.“- Lord Henry in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.